Ground Report

Three New Restaurants on Columbus Ave in the 80s:

A few months ago I badgered my friends to accept my invites to UpNext, which is a 3D map of Manhattan that shows nearly every listing on the island from copy centers to senior citizen lounges in stuyvestant town.

Tonight I saw there were upgrades to UpNext and realized I hadn’t been back to UpNext.com in a while, but even after being obsessed with the grid for nearly 2 years from my perch on the UWS this is still the best orientation tool. Instead of using the limited view in Facebook I thought I’d go full screen, and though I usually use UpNext to figure out the labyrinth of downtown, tonight I saw the new stars shining brightly on the UpperWestSide.

What are the other two restaurants? In addition to Eighty One which I haven’t yet been to, Pinch, which I knew was moving from Rose Hill where I work on Park Ave copied a mass market restaurant innovation that I happen to know quite well. In its new home Pinch has done for locally grown comfort food groups what Yum! Brands did for fast food groups: they combined its usual customized pizza barges with customized mac and cheese pots through a merger with the East Village’s S’mac (same link as 3 lines up if you missed it) …. This is a lot like those KFC/PizzaHut or TacoBell/LongJohn Silvers’ albeit on an even smaller scale than B.R. Guest or Lettuce Entertain You . MicroFood mergers aren’t necessary with the big players, with Yum! they even let you franchise with one click! I guess we need to use any sort of M&A model we can to rapidly move all downtown food industry brands to the Upper West Side. Don’t be alarmed it’s just part of the plan that I mentioned in an earlier post. But I know you’re wondering, do we really need two pinkberries? Orion’s belt buckle is called Madeline Mae – Pan Asian & brunch. Haven’t been there yet either. The real winner here is UpNext. With millions of posts coming from the Grub Street Blog every second this nice visual display helped me catch the new UWS’izens much quicker and saved many searches and thus megabitings, which is a fine thing; seeing as last Tuesday was earth day and all.